With a new enterprise agreement adopted, a new structure in place and new teaching positions allocated, the hard stuff seems sorted. It isn’t.

The campus branch of the National Tertiary Education Union is lodging an industrial dispute over academic workload models. According to the union, allocation of work starts next month, but “academic staff in most parts of the university have no idea how workload is measured and allocated.” This, the union says, breaches the new enterprise agreement, not least because, “management appears to persist with secretive, opaque and non-compliant workload allocation machinations.”

The NTEU calls for meetings of management and staff at each college to settle on “a collaborative process” to develop workload models. To which the University responded last night, “we have just received a notification from the NTEU and will assess and respond in accordance with the requirements of our Enterprise Agreement.”